He/She's So Fine

FICTIONAL transsexual educators aren't what they used to be. Three decades ago, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge was digging her high heels into Hollywood's solar plexus, using her teaching job at the Academy of Drama and Modeling to stamp out ''the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood.'' By contrast, Dana Stevens, the protagonist of Chris Bohjalian's ''Trans-Sister Radio,'' is a gentle film-and-lit professor in Vermont, a stand-up kind of guy and pure catnip to a divorced schoolteacher named Allison Banks.

Allison is so taken with her new lover that she happily glosses over his plucked eyebrows and missing body hair. And she is more shocked than perhaps she should be to learn that Dana is a preoperative transsexual who wants not only to replace his penis with a vagina but to go on seeing Allison once he's done it. Once she gets over her initial repulsion, Allison finds herself warming to the idea. ''Wasn't it conceivable,'' she asks herself, ''that I might still love Dana after the surgery? Perhaps love had absolutely nothing to do with sexual preference. Perhaps you just fell in love with a person -- gender be damned.''

Swallowing her misgivings, she installs the transformed Dana as her live-in lover. Neither of them, however, has reckoned with the good folk of Allison's hometown. Nasty graffiti turn up on Allison's front door; parents start pulling their children from her class; and her principal prods her to take an extended leave. The couple's only hope for a public hearing lies with Will, Allison's former husband and the president of Vermont Public Radio, who carries a sputtering torch for Allison and, more disturbingly for him, has a nascent fascination with Allison's new lover.

And why not? Dana is not just a convincing female but the hottest woman rural Vermont has ever seen: ''tall and slim and proud . . . almost too beautiful to be around.'' Bohjalian has, in short, given us Myra Breckinridge without the revenge fantasies. He wants us to stop worrying and love the transsexual, and so he has supplied a transsexual who is impossible not to love. A fabulous baker, a masseuse extraordinaire, Dana rarely slips outside the bounds of propriety and never loses her glibness, even when describing the torment of growing up in the wrong body.

But the honest, messy pain of gender dysphoria would be too unsettling for this book, with its cutesy title and perky prose. And a more nuanced heroine might not comport so easily with the countercultural sympathy that, in novels like ''Midwives'' and ''The Law of Similars,'' Bohjalian lavishes on people who do things differently from everyone else. In his hands, they must also be better than everyone else, kinder, smarter, more attractive. With their private colleges, baby-boom politics and Queen Anne porches, the people in ''Trans-Sister Radio'' are perfect avatars of what might be called the National Public Radio elite. And so it's only fitting that their story should play out as an NPR feature (complete with a lead-in from Linda Wertheimer) and that in telling their story, they should all speak in the same NPR voice: fluent and progressive, unfailingly nice.

Bohjalian is a solid craftsman who does his research and knows how to keep a story zipping along, but by insisting on his characters' own superiority, he robs them of fiction's complicating truths. The result is less an inversion of ''Myra Breckinridge'' than an update of ''Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.'' And like that hallmark of Hollywood liberalism, ''Trans-Sister Radio'' makes its ''aberrant'' character so unthreatening and unimpeachable that he/she becomes a cipher upon which we can project our self-congratulation. ''Dana's just like us!'' we are meant to conclude. But is that what makes transsexuals interesting? Or is it how radically they diverge from ''us'' and become something wholly their own? Their reinvention is, by its very nature, transgressive, and it may require a more transgressive prose than Bohjalian, for all his good intentions, can supply.

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A version of this review appears in print on June 4, 2000, on Page 7007035 of the National edition with the headline: He/She's So Fine. Today's Paper|Subscribe